Tuesday, December 7, 2010

How To Fly in Dreams

Flying during a dream carries an amazing sense of liberty, weightlessness, and power that is hard to replicate in waking life. Being able to fly in your dreams can give you a sense of doing the impossible, and with some practice in the art of lucid dreaming, you can learn to fly in your dreams at will.

Steps

Consider the purpose of flying in your dreams. Flying is a liberating feeling and not something that comes naturally to humans, so the ability to fly in a dream allows you to transcend everyday life. Flying can often be an ideal dream metaphor for release or freedom after you've experienced an emotional breakthrough, allowing you soar above hardships and mental blockages of the past.[1] Given that the sky has no limit, this can be indicative that you don't feel constrained and that you're looking down on everything from a refreshed, new perspective that lets you see things differently.

Flying dreams are considered to be normal dreams and they are usually associated with extremely positive and exhilarating feelings, with some dreamers reporting a "high" after a flying dream that lasts for several days following.[2]

Understand that to induce flying in your dreams, you usually need to be aware of the fact that you're dreaming. This is a phenomenon known as lucid dreaming. Flying usually requires low levels of lucidity, which means that you may only be partially aware that you are in a dream, not that you fully understand that you are actually in bed and asleep.[3]

Flying dreams are excellent dream subjects for lucid dreaming as voluntary control of a flying dream is already a strong feature of such a dream.[4]

While you're still awake, try to keep alert to the fact that you're dreaming until you fall into sleep paralysis and eventually sleep. Keeping your awareness level high before sleep can and will help you remain aware that you are dreaming once you enter REM sleep.

Tell yourself that you're dreaming, and think of a story that involves flying. Your dream should mimic the story in your mind.

Once you're lucid dreaming, try the following method for encouraging your dreaming self to fly:[5]

Materialize a jet pack or flying skateboard to use. Or, try to jump off a tall building. Visualize jumping off a diving board into the sky. [6]

Use external stimuli. In some cases, it can be possible to use external stimuli to change the direction of a dream. One dream investigator raised or lowered the hospital bed of dreaming test subjects and upon awakening, some of them reported dreams of falling or flying.[7] Obviously, the reliability of this method is not certain and even the ability to do this can be challenging unless you're mechanically minded or have a dutiful friend who stays awake and tries to help you. All the same, if you can think of ways to manipulate your external environment safely, this might be another method for inducing flying dreams.

An easier external stimulus is imagery. Some dreamers use imagery to encourage dreaming, such as posters or pictures of objects like rockets, planes, helicopters, parachutes, hang-gliders, etc. Looking at these intently, or perhaps landscapes taken from the air or space, just before sleep, can be another way to program your dreaming mind.

Interpret your flying dreams. While a lucid dream is driven principally by you, dreaming of flying generally can have myriad interpretations and the landscape and accompanying elements will have an impact on the overall interpretation. If you'd like to interpret a flying dream, then the following suggested interpretations might be of interest:

If you've been flying during the day, then it's probably a by-product of your hang-gliding, helicopter, or light aircraft experience.[8]

Flying dreams that have you stopped by power lines, or you're barely able to get off the ground, can indicate that something you're trying to get going in real life is limited by your ability, or other things.[9]

Flying freely and with great pleasure can indicate a wide range of emotions, feelings, and possibilities, such as: escapism; facing the future with confidence; getting in touch with your inner self (spirituality); no longer being held back by prior hardships or blockages.[10]

If you're using a contraption to fly with, such as a bed, chair, machine, etc., it could suggest that while you're feeling adventurous, you're still either cautious or you're wanting to keep secure ties with home and family.[11]

Flying dreams can indicate a compensation for feelings of inferiority in daily life, or as an opportunity to get on top of things so that you can sort your priorities and assess where things currently stand in your life.[12]

Video

Some tips on how to lucid dream.

Tips

Believe you can do it, and know how to do it. Immersing yourself into the world of lucid dreams will make your probability of dreaming much, much higher.

Implement daily reality checks into your life. This means that during various parts of the day, keep yourself aware that you are in your waking life. Do this by looking at a clock and looking back again, because in a dream, it will never be the same. It may look distorted or have weird characteristics.

Look in the mirror often, in dreams and real life. In a dream, your face will almost always be distorted in various ways.

Be patient. It takes a lot of practice, and mostly involves immersing yourself into the culture of lucidity.

Warnings

If you jump off a building and don't know what you are doing, you may fall and wake up.

To fly in dreams actually requires to believe. If you do not fully believe you are dreaming or that you can do this, you will most likely wake yourself up trying to do so.

Try to think of your dream as a story, not as thinking in the moment. Make up the story as you go and if all goes well, your dreams will follow that path.

If you're a sleepwalker, dreaming of jumping off something can be very dangerous as you may be doing it in reality. Seek medical help if you experience sleepwalking.

If a flying dream ends violently with a fall, it might indicate a level of insecurity in your life despite the feeling of freedom the flying brought you.[13] Flying too far and losing touch with reality is also a warning dream.[14]